Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth."

I'm not sure if the latest version of Google Earth can display moving maps, I have yet to see that, but you can get.kmz files with overlays of weather data pretty easily for the US and EU. Just search for.kmz files using intellicast data for your local area or something similiar. There are so many there's no point in me posting a link, I have doppler from intellicast and IR cloud data coming in from NOAA in google earth myself, comes in handy. Being new to my area I find myself in google earth quite a lot

Cute 3-D pictures generated by Google will not stop the destruction of the earth. Companies and persons intending to rape the earth will laugh at environmentalists' puny efforts to save it.

How can we save the earth?

Google should arm leftist guerillas in key areas with high-value ecosystems: e.g., the rain forest. In exchange for arming the guerillas, they agree to help the environments by killing poachers and blowing up companies that rape the environment.

Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.

Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...

Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.

Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...

Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.

You might be aiming for funny, but yes, Korean and Japanese fishing vessels really go out of the way to get their fish, they devastate the areas just outside the 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zones of most countries (see: United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea).

Here's a really neat collection of links on the subject of overfishing I found while searching for this:

Do no evil doesn't mean so good. It mean do business without doing evil.That being said, the parent post said Google should arm leftist guerillas in key areas with high-value ecosystems: e.g., the rain forest. In exchange for arming the guerillas, they agree to help the environments by killing poachers and blowing up companies that rape the environment.

The problem is when My daughter gets kills for playing in the street that becomes the battleground for the leftist, they have done evil. If the leftist gue

(hey, I didn't make the reference; I would have compared it to the James Bond "Golden Eye" movie)

The GoldenEye weapon caused an EMP blast, which, in the movie, knocked out any electronic gear in the radius. It didn't directly cause actual physical destruction of the landscape (The whole plan was to use the EMP as cover to steal cash money from the british financial system, not nuke the place from orbit)

... should be that the US has a 200-800 year supply of coal, and if OPEC or anyone else in the world says "screw the US", the US can just turn around and say "screw you". Coal can be processed to make fuel too. We shouldn't sell our independence and liberty down the river for the sake of some enviromental cause. Even if we used all the coal, only the tiniest percential of mountains would even have noticable changes.

Well not no value, but very little. You could have posted your whole summary here, plus the link on your blog doesn't work anymore. I just found going to RTFA a little annoying so figured I'd give the next person a shorter path.

Well that's a value judgement, I guess. If you want to read 4 minutes into the Cringely article to find out that Google is building next to hydro because it's a UPS, that's great. But not everybody cares to.

You could have posted your whole summary here

Yeah, and if was paid to be here that might be a good plan. Copy and pasting a URL was the fastest way for me to share some information (for free). Feel free to not follow any of my links if it's entirely too much work for

A smarter and better option is to increase R & D into renewable energy. My employer's father (and the company founder) converted internal combustion engines to run off coal during WWII out of sheer necessity. Not a minor engineering feat. Performing this on a widespread scale carries far less insight than developing new technology, such as hydrogen.

Um... Hydrogen isn't a renewable energy source. It is an energy storage mechanism. So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars. (Hydro and wind don't yet scale up well enough, and most people are scared of nuclear.) Coal plants generally burn cleaner than gas cars due to efficiencies of scale so it's still a net win, but people need to stop thinking that Hydrogen fixes all our energy problems.

Would you say that algae farms that photosynthesize sunlight and produce hydrogen to burn to get energy is a more efficient energy path that soaking up the sunlight's energy directly with solar panels? I think not.

Manufacturing algae is probably more efficient than manufacturing solar panels. In addition, compare what happens to a solar cell when it's reached its end-of-life to an alga that's reached its end-of-life.

You'd be surprised I think. The hydrogen producing algae need fairly special conditions and fairly special algae. This means that they would need to be encased in light transmitting, long life, hydrogen proof panels of some sort - and quickly you're looking at panel technologies that are going to be more expensive than simple coatings approaches required for PV. Concentrating approaches that work for PV would kill the algae too. The algae will need nutrients and waste handling as well as hydrogen separa

Would you say that algae farms that photosynthesize sunlight and produce hydrogen to burn to get energy is a more efficient energy path that soaking up the sunlight's energy directly with solar panels? I think not.

Ce depend, it depends. Though they are improving in efficiency solar PVs, photovoltaic, panels aren't really efficient. The best ones I've heard of are only about 22% efficient. They are good at the point of use, but if the place the energy derived is not local then an energy carrier such as

Cool. If it is the otto cycle engine then it is likely going to be able to run from corn husks and other by products from farming that have similar properties to coal. There is enough fuel potential in corn and several other farm product that they become explosive and ignite similar to coal dust plume.I believe the original Diesel engine could run on these things too but couldn't switch easily between different fuels because the pressure needed to ignite the different fuels change with the fuels and you cou

This doesn't exactly make sense.If you were able to produce energy from renewable sources at prices that were less than non-renewable sources, only a fool would keep using the non-renewables. Now, it might in fact happen, that once everyone had switched over to the new, cheaper, renewable energy source, energy consumption would actually increase, because with it being cheaper, suddenly things that weren't practical before, would be. That's all pretty straightforward capitalism-in-action.

The problem isn't really capitolism. It also has to do with finding renewable energy that we can actualy use. Hydrogen cars will cost significantly more the regular cars, not alot of people are going to be willing to buy them unless they can get fuel easily (sucks being out of gas on the interstate durring rush hour and noticing the only thing stopping people from driving by and making fun of you is the five or ten accidents that happened because of the backup you caused by blocking a lane of travel), they

Blaming "capitalism" for these effects makes about as much sense to me as blaming Boyle's Law for a hurricane.

Bull. Markets are not natural laws like physics, they're created by legislation. E.g. property and contract law. Policy can greatly impact markets. The trillion-dollar subsidy of oil happening in Iraq right now will never be fully reflected in the pump price of gas. The costs of building levies to keep Florida and New York above water will certainly not be paid by today's oil companies and

It's not efficient, is it? It wasn't in the 1940s when Germany was producing ersatz low-quality oils and fuel from coal.

Then there's the environmental impact of coal strip-mining. Even deep mines will have problems with sinkholes and where to put the tailings. The stuff's awful when burned, much dirtier than even diesel fuel, unless you gasify it first.

Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.

Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts and the US is VERY friendly with two of the nations with the largest supplies (Australia, and everybody's favourite exploiter of Yankee overpopulation, Canada). Still, with just a bit of effort and will, America could satisfy both environmental concerns and industrial concerns using coal. Nuclear power and America's bountiful wind and tidal resources just make the picture that much sweeter.

Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.

Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts

Have you ever seen what uranium mining does? Many of those who live where it is mined are opposed to the mining, such as the Diné or Navajo [sric.org] and those in Saskatchewan [accesscomm.ca]. Aboriginals in Australia have fighting mining since before it started

Buddy, if we could find some way to turn Roses into the most efficient fuel known to man, there would be people opposed to having rose-plantations near their house. It's called "NIMBY", and you'll find that a case of it exists for any project worth pursuing.

Buddy, if we could find some way to turn Roses into the most efficient fuel known to man, there would be people opposed to having rose-plantations near their house. It's called "NIMBY", and you'll find that a case of it exists for any project worth pursuing.

Just because NIMBYism exists doesn't mean mining for uranium isn't envornmentally distructive. And in some cases, such as the ones I cited regarding the Diné or Navajo and the aboriginals of Australia, it's their land that's being mined without

These days, in the U.S., many Indian "tribes" are little more than fronts for con men looking to build casinos. They have about as much "indian" in them as George W. Bush.

And the real indian population is little better. The romanticism of the "wise old indian with wind blowing through his hair" bears little resemblence to the "unemployed alcoholic living off the government teet and beating his wife in a trailer on a broken-down reservation" reality.

You'll never catch ME going out and suing the government to get back land that my great grandparents were too stupid to not trade for muskets.

Would you feel the same if government killed your relatives then took the land they lived on? How about if your city hall condemned your land and gave it to someone else so they could build a multimillion dollar plant as in a case the USSC heard last year about a case in New Jersey where a city condemned some people's homes to give to a multinational corporation t

I'd be pretty aggravated if the government killed my relatives and took their land, yes. Would I expect the government to give ME the land? Now that's just stupid. To assert that I am, in that case, owed anything more substantial than a "sorry, our bad" is beyond ridiculous.

If the government were trying to take ANYONE'S land now, without at least the decency to pay them the market value of the land plus some despotism surcharge and the requirement of making a "the survival of our society depends on thi

There is a gargantuan difference between asserting that the government has no right to take what is mine, and asserting that other people have no right to keep what was once in the distance past owned by my ancestors.

So then it's alright if the government takes the land you own when you die and give it someone else instead of you giving the land to your inheritors?

It's really a meaningless idea. Even if I give my property to my children BEFORE I die, the government can still take a goodly chunk of it (in the form of income taxes if nothing else -- nearly all gifts qualify as income). If we're talking about land, the government generally has some sayso over how it changes hands anyway. Cities do and always have asserted their right to dictate how land is used, and to dictate the terms by which it changes hands. And we're not even talking about ME deciding who gets

the government can still take a goodly chunk of it (in the form of income taxes if nothing else -- nearly all gifts qualify as income).

As of a couple of years ago what a person could give as a gift or inheritance tax free was $600,000. It was only amounts over this that was taxed. Though I'm no expert I know of this because I was told it by my sister who is a Certified Public Accountant, CPA [wikipedia.org], and her husband who is a Certified Financial Planner [wikipedia.org], CFP. Actually at this tyme of year, she works 16 hours

Oh, I missed this when I posted my first reply, which is okay as it is a totally separate issue:

We'd probably have to dredge up some Siberian or Mongolian farmer who just happens to be the closest living relative to the very first people to cross the landbridge, and give all of North America and South America to him.

Maybe you don't know but the first inhabitants of the Americas DID NOT cross the Siberian, Alaskan land bridge from Asia to the Americas. The Americas had populations of people before the

That's ludicrous. Are you really suggesting that you wouldn't bother trying to become wealthy if you couldn't pass it on to your children? The millions of people that DON'T have children, and STILL work to better themselves and accumulate wealth and property speak to the absurdity of that claim.

I fully agree that people should be free to dispense their estate however they like. What I don't agree with is the notion that their children have a right to that estate. They don't have ANY right to ANY of it

I fully agree that people should be free to dispense their estate however they like. What I don't agree with is the notion that their children have a right to that estate.

I phrased it wrong, what I meant is that people should be able to decide for themself who their inheritors will be, whether it's their children, charity, the government, or someone/thing else. I'm not married and don't have children but even if I did if I were to die wealthy I'd either have a foundation setup much as Bill Gates did or

Of course people should have that right, it's a perfectly reasonable freedom that aligns well with our instinctual notions of how "property" functions (unlike, say, renting things or intellectual property). Nevertheless, certain types of property -- particularly real estate (and money, which the state owns anyway) -- the remainder of society is inherently among the stakeholders, and the property can not be dispensed arbitrarily. If you want your land to be contaminated with uranium salts when you die, it

You're right. We should just all move into caves. Oh wait, burning wood creates pollution too, so no cooking fires in the caves. Let's just kill all humans and be done with it, since that's the ultimate end point in the line of reasoning used by the more radical elements of the environmental movement.

You've obviously never seen the devastation caused by slurry "dams" breaking and flooding valleys with the muck. Or never had to deal with the dust generated by the mining or the pollution to the groundwater. I can guess you've never had to meet a coal truck on small country road at night in a blind curve. And we haven't even gotten to mud runoff from bare mountains yet. Forget Google Earth. If you've never seen the ugliness left behind by mountain top removal up close and personal, then you can't truly understand how bad it really is.

The problem that most people don't get is that many of the people who stand to feel the negative effects from this type of mining are those that actually live there. On the average, they don't have any clout or power to do anything about it. Even worse--they often make their living from it so that it is needed as much as it is hated.

Want to extract energy from Appalachia? Heck, if you're willing to turn the beautiful mountain views into a wasteland, just stick lots and lots of windmills on top of the mountains. 50 to 100 feet off the tops of the mountains, the wind blows quite strongly virtually all the time. At least that way the people in the valleys can still drink their well water.

Coal trucks are, on the average, infinitely more dirty than logging trucks. Guess what that does to break lights, reflectors and headlights? Add in bit of fog and you can literally run into the back of a coal truck and not know it was there until you hear the metal crunch.Not that logging trucks aren't a problem because they often run on many of the same roads that coal truck drivers do, but based on what I've seen up close, coal trucks pose a much greater road hazard due to the dust on lights and reflector

Friend - we haven't sold our independence and liberty down the river. We've squandered it away to rich Oil Companies and knownothing voters.

We've been too busy worrying about Linux vs. Windows to worry about old-fashioned buzzwords like Freedom, Liberty and Independence.

We are reaping what we are sowing. Most Americans care more about movies about comic book heroes, Latte coffee drinks, and purporting to be holy while cursing the latest football/spectator sport game. We don't have time for silliness like, OUR FREEDOMS and WHAT THEY WILL HAVE MEANT WHEN THEY ARE GONE.

Says a lot. "better people" -- are you saying that military people are better than civilians? That's funny because constitutionally, the military is subserviant to civilian rule

Yes, I, as a man who offers his life for his nation, am subservient to the drunken bum sleeping in a puddle of his own feeces, and the college student who wants to turn my nation into a Communist Dream (tm). Just because they have power over me, doesn't mean that they're in any way better than I am. We GIVE you power over us precisely because we wish to REMAIN better men - we have no desire to turn into power-hungry tyrants ruling over a military dictatorship. Just don't for a minute imagine that these allocations of power somehow make YOU superior.

Coal-To-Liquids (CTL) via the Fischer-Tropsch process not only emits huge amounts of CO2 but only produces small amounts very low quality crude. If OPEC decides to "screw the US" (a very unlikely scenario, more likely, they'll just start running out of the stuff) then even with a massively competent military-style deployment of CTL, prices would still skyrocket. So, I wouldn't rely on it too much if I were you. It will undoubtably help ease the pain though - morphine style.

Terraforming the area does mitigate the damage to the environment significantly, although some companies have replanted the area with grass instead of trees. There has been an effort to encourage replanting of trees, but it might also be interesting to see if switchgrass could be grown there.The largest environmental concern, however, is the production of large amounts of slurry (a water suspension of coal, sulfur, and other minerals that is created as a byproduct of the mining and cleaning process) which

The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)

I vaguely recall that some of the strip mines in eastern Montana (which dwarf these mountaintop mines) were required to post a reclamation bond with the state, following some loot-and-scoot operations such as you describe. I don't recall how successful the bond program was (this was 30-odd years ago), tho I do know some defunct mines were restored, some to a more useful state than the sagebrush and rocks they'd started as.

Never heard of the Appalachia [wikipedia.org] and the Appalachian Mountain range then have you? Or Black Mesa [blackmesais.org]? Coal mining was extensive in both places and still is in Appalachia [coalcampusa.com].

Not all mountains are of igneous origin. Some mountains are formed of heaved-up sedimentary rock. And there is a lot of coal in the deep seams of such mountains (Appalachians, Urals, no doubt others that don't come to mind offhand). Deep seams tend to be high-grade bituminous and anthracite (the result of putting sedimentary coal under pressure), which are more valuable because they burn hotter and cleaner.Conversely, surface coal (the stuff you get from strip mines) tends to be low-grade bituminous, or wo

I won't be surprised if there's a follow-up posted here in a few months about Google Maps and/or other similar services being strong-armed by government/industry (likely under the guise of "protecting homeland security") into censoring environmental damaged areas from public view.

I had a related thought: If Google is in bed with the WWF today, whom might they be in bed with tomorrow?? And might this in turn taint the impartiality of their search results?? What if the WWF, or some other special interest (including the gov't), wishes to exaggerate/denigrate the impact of whatever their overlay is focused on??

Pictures can't convey the devastation that is mountaintop removal.If you've never heard of mountaintop removal or don't see what the big deal is, then please do check out the overlays, but nothing compares to seeing it firsthand.

Any natural destruction: earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane Katrina, pales in comparison. In all these cases, the human community may suffer great losses, structural damage, but these can all be built back in time. In mountaintop removal, the very land itself is utterly destroyed;

Here in SoCal, developers literally move mountains to make more buildable land. Once the newly-flattened earth is covered with tract houses and shopping malls, it's even more irrecoverable than a mined-out mountain (which *could* eventually become an ecosystem again).

I think this sort of think is a great example of how Non Government Organizations (NGOs) can make great use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems).

More NGOs should follow this example and use technology like Google Earth to show where they are working, and what they are doing. This gives people a better idea of where the money they donate is being spent. It also gives people a better idea of what work needs to be done, be it to protect the environment, or to reduce poverty (although the two are fundamentally linked) - this is how technology should be used to make the world a smaller place. What would be great if WWF included on the ground photos of their program activities, so people could take a virtual tour of what was being done.

The next step is for NGOs to use GIS to help them with their work. A good example which I came across was in a refugee camp in Uganda, where they plotted to locations of Cholera outbreaks, and then compared this to the location of all the wells. Some of the wells showed high concertrations of outbreaks around them, indicating that they were contaminated - and so they were closed down. This is just a basic example, GIS could be used to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment.

However I work for an NGO and know how slow they are to adopt new technology, but that's a whole different story...

the flippant nature of the conversation so far kind of disgusts me. I worked for some of these campaigns in West Virginia a couple summers ago, and what's going on down there is terrifying and, in my mind, evil.

The term isn't strip mining. This is worse. They call it Mountaintop Removal Mining, although really they destroy entire mountain ranges, then shovel the rubble into what were valleys, destroying thousands of miles of freshwater creeks. The work takes a crew of no more than a couple dozen, whereas traditional "deep" mining needs hundreds, so the jobs that the Appalachian hill culture depends on have disappeared along with drinking water, wildlife habitat, and resident's health. The destruction is complete. The mountains, their ecosystems, and the cultures they support will never return. Dirty King Coal, meanwhile, reaps unprecedented profits.

Remember, energy from coal is anything but clean. Coal plants push massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the mass extinction we all are witness to.

What's happening in Apallachia, one of Project Censored [projectcensored.org]'s 25 most censored stories of 2005, is a crime against humanity and the planet. I applaud Google for helping to bring attention to it.
If any of you feel like helping in this struggle, www.climateaction.net/mjsb [climateaction.net] is a good place to start.

I used to work for a prominent Appalachian research organization, and had to tow the company line about how destructive strip mining was, how it was going to destroy the environment, blah, blah, blah. But the fact is that most of the strip mines *I* dealt with were little more than temporary eyesores (temporary, since laws required the companies to at least minimally restore the areas effected) in remote areas sparsely populated with litigious, unemployed never-do-wells.

I grew up in appalachia, and have a deep love for the mountains of which you are speaking. While I do agree with you completely that the term genocide is wildly inaccurate, and in principle, rearranging rocks is not a big deal, even when done on a big scale; I take issue with the idea that mountaintop removal has no real environmental impact.Please note that I am FAR from an environmentalist. I believe that we need to be responsible with the environment, balancing that with the energy needs that we have.

And we mined it in the US of A for a couple centuries now without MTR. Why is it so vital to do MTR now?From an energy perspective, someone has already brought up wind. Once you chop off the top of a mountain, there isn't anywhere to stick a windmill anymore when the coal is all gone.

What the "new breed" of mining companies that practice MTR (Massey et al) are doing isn't necessary to provide us with energy. It's pure short term greed. They want to strip all the mountains they can before enough people wake

Oak Mapper [oakmapper.org] is another site that shows some other negative environmental effects of the global economy, albeit less starkly visible. Oak Mapper is a webGIS that helps track the progress of Sudden Oak Death [wikipedia.org], a disease that is significantly altering the oak woodlands of California. If you download the KMZ or zoom into a marked area on the Google Maps version, you can see dead tree crowns around the site of the reported siting (the one in China Camp State Park just north north east of San Francisco has some g

For those who actually want to try out this, go to http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/ [ilovemountains.org]. It describes which layers to turn on in Google Earth to be able to see the Appalachian mountains removal.

Environmentalism has overextended its welcome in the public mind and it's time people talked aboutthe issues _behind_ environmentalism, instead of picking up a cue sheet of things to moan about fromyour local environmentalist outfit.

Man-made or naturally occuring CO2, the latest science shows that neither are the cause of globalwarming but a symptom. Looking at the data first the temperatures go up and _then_ CO2 lagging afterthe temperature curve of hundreds of years. I suppose they prefer to talk about 470 mountains andhills instead. Those are obviously man-made.

You mean the Channel 4 programme - I hesitate to say 'documentary' as it made Michael Moore look professional and honest - which has since been denounced [mit.edu] by one of the scientists the makers tricked into appearing?

Maybe if the game commission hadn't kicked all user groups but hunters out of the gamelands (which comprise the majority of forests in the state), they'd have a stronger group dedicated to keeping that kind of stuff from happening.